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Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

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A wondrous debut from an extraordinary new voice in nonfiction, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.

“At one point, Miller dives into the ocean into a school of fish…comes up for air, and realizes she’s in love. That’s how I felt: Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.” —The New York Times Book Review

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.

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Why Fish Don't Exist - Lulu Miller

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This is for you, Dad.

Prologue

Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job—

Chaos will get them.

Chaos will crack them from the outside—with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet—or unravel them from the inside, with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build.

It’s not if, it’s when. Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all. My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.

A smart human accepts this truth. A smart human does not try to fight it.

But one spring day in 1906, a tall American man with a walrus mustache dared to challenge our master.

His name was David Starr Jordan, and in many ways, it was his day job to fight Chaos. He was a taxonomist, the kind of scientist charged with bringing order to the Chaos of the earth by uncovering the shape of the great tree of life—that branching map said to reveal how all plants and animals are interconnected. His specialty was fish, and he spent his days sailing the globe in search of new species. New clues that he hoped would reveal more about nature’s hidden blueprint.

For years he worked, for decades, so tirelessly that he and his crew would eventually discover

a full fifth of fish known to man in his day. By the thousand he reeled in new species, dreaming up names for them, punching those names into shiny tin tags, dropping the tags alongside their specimens into jars of ethanol, slowly stacking his discoveries higher and higher.

Until one spring morning in 1906, an earthquake struck and toppled his shimmering collection to the ground.

Hundreds of jars shattered against the floor. His fish specimens were mutilated by broken glass and fallen shelves. But worst of all were the names. Those carefully placed tin tags had been launched at random all over the ground. In some terrible act of Genesis in reverse, his thousands of meticulously named fish had transformed back into a heaping mass of the unknown.

But as he stood there in the wreckage, his life’s work eviscerated at his feet, this mustachioed scientist did something strange. He didn’t give up or despair. He did not heed what seemed to be the clear message of the quake: that in a world ruled by Chaos, any attempts at order are doomed to fail eventually. Instead, he rolled up his sleeves and scrambled around until he found, of all the weapons in the world, a sewing needle.

He took the needle between his thumb and forefinger, laced it with thread, and aimed it at one of the few fish he recognized amid the destruction. With one fluid movement, he plunged the needle through the flesh at the fish’s throat. Then he used the trailing thread to stitch a name tag directly to the flesh itself.

For each fish he could salvage, he repeated this tiny gesture. No longer would he let the tin tags sit precariously in the jars. Instead, he sewed each name directly to the creature’s skin. A name stitched to its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. It was a small innovation with a defiant wish, that his work would now be protected against the onslaughts of Chaos, that his order would stand tall next time she struck.

When I first heard about David Starr Jordan’s attack on Chaos, I was in my early twenties, starting out as a science reporter. Instantly, I assumed he was a fool. The needle might work against a quake, but what about fire or flood or rust or any of the trillion modes of destruction he hadn’t thought to consider? His innovation with the sewing needle seemed so flimsy, so shortsighted, so magnificently unaware of the forces that ruled him. He seemed to me a lesson in hubris. An Icarus of the fish collection.

But as I grew older, as Chaos had her way with me, as I made a wreck of my own life and began to try to piece it back together, I started to wonder about this taxonomist. Maybe he had figured something out—about persistence, or purpose, or how to go on—that I needed to know. Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?

So, one wintry afternoon when I was feeling particularly hopeless, I typed the name David Starr Jordan into Google and was met with a sepia photograph of an old white man with a bushy walrus mustache. His eyes looked a little hard.

Who are you? I wondered. A cautionary tale? Or a model of how to be?

I clicked through to more pictures of him. There he was as a boy, suddenly lamblike, with spilling dark curls and protruding ears. There he was as a young man, standing upright in a rowboat. His shoulders had filled out and he was biting his lower lip in a way that could almost be classified as sultry. There he was as a grandfatherly old man, sitting in an armchair, scratching a shaggy, white dog. I saw links to articles and books he had written. Fish-collecting guides, taxonomic studies of the fishes of Korea, of Samoa, of Panama. But there were also essays about drinking and humor and meaning and despair. He had written children’s books and satires and poems and, best of all, for the lost journalist seeking guidance in the lives of others, an out-of-print memoir called The Days of a Man, packed tight with so many details about said days of said man it had to be broken into two volumes. It was nearly a century out of print, but I found a used-book dealer who would sell it to me for $27.99.

When the package arrived, it felt warm, enchanted. As if it contained a treasure map. I slid a steak knife through the packing tape, and two olive-green tomes spilled out, each glittering with gold letters. I made a huge pot of coffee and sat down on the couch, the first volume on my lap, ready to find out what becomes of you when you refuse to surrender to Chaos.

1.

A Boy with His Head in the Stars

David Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851 at the darkest time of the year, which is perhaps why he became so preoccupied with the stars. "

While husking corn on autumn evenings, he writes of his boyhood, I became curious as to the names and significance of the celestial bodies." He could not just enjoy their twinkling; he found them a mess he needed ordered, known. When he was about eight years old, he got his hands on an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. Night by night he went, creeping out of the house, attempting to learn the name of every star in the sky. And according to him, it took only five years to bring order to the entire night sky. As a reward,

he chose Starr as his middle name, and wore it proudly for the rest of his life.

Having mastered the celestial, David Starr Jordan turned to the terrestrial. His family’s land swelled and rolled with its own unique constellations of trees, boulders, farm buildings, and livestock. His parents kept him busy with chores, shearing the sheep, clearing brush, and—

David’s specialty—sewing rags into rugs (his flexor tendons learning early how to wield a needle). But in between chores, David began to map the land.

For help, he turned to his big brother, Rufus, thirteen years older, a quiet and gentle nature lover with deep brown eyes. Rufus taught David how to settle the horses, with long strokes down the neck, where in the thickets to find the juiciest blueberries. Watching Rufus demystify the earth, David was transfixed; he says he

held Rufus in absolute worship. Slowly, David

began drawing intricate maps of everything they saw. He drew maps of his family’s orchard, his walk to school, and when he finished the land he knew, he turned to places far away. He copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, until his hungry little fingers had crawled over nearly every corner of the globe.

"

The eagerness I then displayed, he writes, rather worried my mother," a large woman named Huldah. One day, having had enough, she took his whole pile of maps, creased and stained with his boyish sweat, and chucked it.

Why? Who knows. Perhaps it was because Huldah and her husband, Hiram, were devout Puritans. They prided themselves on

martyr-y accomplishments like never laughing out loud and beating the sun to the fields each morning. Spending one’s time making maps of lands already mapped would have seemed like a frivolity, an insult to the use of a day, especially when they were struggling as they were, when there were apples to pick and

potatoes to hoe and rags to sew.

Or perhaps Huldah’s disapproval was simply a reflection of the times. By the mid-nineteenth century, the obsessive ordering of the natural world was beginning to fall out of fashion. The Age of Discovery had started over four hundred years before, and pretty much wrapped up in 1758, when the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, finished his masterpiece, Systema Naturae, a proposed blueprint for all the interconnections of life. (No matter that

Linnaeus’s chart was riddled with mistakes: misfiling bats as primates and sea urchins as worms, to name a couple.) As

boats raced more frequently from port to port, the excitement of glimpsing exotic specimens and maps—once a way of luring people into shops, taverns, coffeehouses—was wearing off. Dust was collecting upon cabinets of curiosity; the world, it seemed, had become known.

Though there’s a chance it could have been something else. At that very moment, a blasphemous text was screeching through the presses. On the Origin of Species was released to the masses in 1859, just as little David was beginning to scrunch his nose up at the stars. Is there any possibility that Huldah could have read the newspapers, could have sensed that the order of the natural world was about to cave in?

Whatever the reason, Huldah would not budge. With her fist full of David’s crumpled maps, she told her son to

find something more relevant to do with his time.

Like a good boy, he obeyed: he stopped making maps. But like a real boy, he did not. Not really.

"

The country round about my home was very rich in wild flowers," he writes, trying to blame the earth for his sin. On his way home from school he began to ever so occasionally pluck a velvety blue pom-pom or silken orange star from the grass. Some he’d sniff and let fall to the ground, but occasionally one would linger in his fingers and make it back to his bedroom, where it would lie on the bed and taunt him with its mysterious arrangement of petals. He would try to suppress this desire to know it, its name, its exact location on the tree of life. And he did pretty well, until puberty hit.

On his first day of middle school, David secreted home from the library "

a little book on flowers." And back in the privacy of his room, he’d sit, manual in hand, desk dirty with flowers, discerning which flower was which, unbuttoning its genus, its species. A near man now, with some hair on his toes, his voice dropping, he’d occasionally taunt his mother by revealing the scientific names of the blossoms they walked by—transmuting periwinkles into Vinca major or sunflowers into Helianthus annuus—as though to say that this passion of his could not be swatted out of him, crumpled up or thrown away. "

I perhaps strained a point by adorning the conveniently white walls of my bedroom with the names of the different plants as I identified them in turn," he writes.

He began keeping questionable company, with a poor farmer up the road named Joshua Ellenwood who had learned the scientific name of almost every plant in the region. For accomplishing such a feat, the old man was regarded by his neighbors as "

shiftless and a waster of time."

David was in awe of him. He began trailing the old man on his walks through the countryside, trying to seep up as many of his tricks as possible—the ways species revealed themselves in leaf shape or petal count or aroma. After meeting Joshua, David renounced his love of beauty, declaring that the dull and ugly flowers—the dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) and buttercups (Ranunculus acris)—held better clues to nature’s blueprint. "

The little ones, he wrote, even though not beautiful, meant more to me than a hundred big ones all of a kind. A special proof of scientific as distinguished from aesthetic interest is to care for the hidden and insignificant."

The hidden and insignificant.

Could David be revealing something about himself in there? Though he doesn’t let on to it much in his memoir, the human world could be hard on him. The historian Edward McNall Burns writes that when David’s parents enrolled him in a boarding school, "the

girls did not consider [him] too promising, for it is said that other young males were sometimes hauled up at night [to the girls’ dorm] in a basket intended to be used for elevating fuel." David, alas, never once got to experience the miracle of basket flight.

As he grew up, the outside world seemed to grow harsher. He writes of skating out onto an ice pond only to get in a

tussle with a boy much smaller than him, of trying to sing but being told to

quit by his music teacher, of the baseball game he joined at the age of sixteen that ended abruptly when he dove for a fly ball and was "

led off with a broken nose, which, being badly set, has ever since remained slightly askew." And then there was his first teaching gig, his pupils a group of unruly boys in a nearby town. For weeks David attempted to maintain some semblance of order by conducting class with a wooden pointer; he’d wave it around, trying to focus their attention, occasionally even whapping the worst of the boys with it. Until, that is, the boys revolted. They descended upon David, grabbed his trusty pointer, and

set it on fire.

He writes of turning to more solitary pleasures—reading adventure stories and poetry, consuming himself with the task of trying to "

clasp [my] hands and jump through them. But even in solitude he wasn’t safe. One day, when David was eleven years old and happily

engaged in the congenial task of burning stumps, his older sister, Lucia, appeared at the doorway to their farmhouse, screaming, as he recalls it, that if I wanted to see my brother alive I must hurry to the house."

David was confused. Rufus wasn’t even supposed to be home. A passionate abolitionist, he had recently left to enlist in the Union army. But before getting to set foot on the battlefield, before getting to test the strength of his conviction, Rufus had contracted a mysterious illness in training camp. It was a sickness that moved quickly through his body, raising his temperature and boiling his skin with rose-colored spots—a disease with no known cause or cure in those days, called, simply, army fever. (Decades later it would be named typhus.)

When David reached his brother’s bedside, Rufus’s compass-like eyes were lolling and loose, barely able to focus. David stayed by the bed for hours, willing the fates to restore some strength to his brother’s body.

The next morning, Rufus did not wake.

"

I still remember the long period of loneliness and distress after his untimely death, David writes. Night after night I would dream that it was not true and that he had returned safe and sound."

After Rufus’s death, David’s journals

explode with color. Meticulously rendered sketches of wildflowers and ferns and ivies and brambles and any scraps of nature, it seemed, he could tear away from the world.

Rezensionen

Jennifer Jenkins

I enjoyed this book. It’s a mixture of biography of a famous ichthyologist/taxonomist that is tied into a narrative of the author’s own life. In many ways, I found that mixture quite beautiful. As a scientist myself, very familiar in the evolutionary concepts described in portions of this book, I don’t feel like the author adequately describes them for an unfamiliar reader. If I weren’t a biologist myself, I would be very confused.